Any advice on useful online (free) writing&publishing software?

First let me point out that I mean the small time publishing, as in sending you're friends and posting a story on a few forums.

I am asking this because I published two stories of mine via Google Driv, one of which was written on GD and other one copied on to it.

The problem is that once I "published" it, the spaces between my words and sentences got messed up. The format of the page was more wide then when I wrote on it, which means the reader did not get the story as I wanted him/her to see it.

I also found that some people are not willing to download a simple docx file, it's just to inconvenient for them, especially if they are not on a pc/laptop or use some one else's computer.

I'm hoping Scrivener's formatting will be close to what I need when I'm ready but a friend of mine with a couple self published ebooks under her belt was telling me something about taking all the code out and and doing this and that which was meaningless to me at the time. When I get to that stage then I hope to get some more advice from her.

I would suggest plain ordinary unformatted text, without line breaks (except, of course, for paragraph breaks). Write the story in whatever you like, but when you're ready to post it in some system or other, either paste it into a text editor to strip the formatting, or save the file as a text file. Then paste it into wherever you wanted to post it, and it won't carry any formatting garbage with it. Then you can add any desired formatting in that location.

That's how I blog, anyway, and avoid the "formatting petting zoo" that I see in so many blogs.

I'm hoping Scrivener's formatting will be close to what I need when I'm ready but a friend of mine with a couple self published ebooks under her belt was telling me something about taking all the code out and and doing this and that which was meaningless to me at the time. When I get to that stage then I hope to get some more advice from her.

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Unfortunately Smashwords is painful to use; when the site first opened, being able to upload a Word doc and have it automatically converted to half a dozen other formats was great, but the world has moved on and Smashwords hasn't. I'm sure you can get Scrivener to produce a doc file in the right format, but it might require some work.

I end up taking the LibreOffice file I use for Createspace and Amazon, then having to cut-and-paste into a new document and reformat. It's why I haven't uploaded my latest ebooks there yet.

If you want to share written things with people online, Scribd is a good solution. Or, at least, it used to be. It appears to be transitioning towards some kind of subscription model.

There are several similar platforms that might work well though. Issuu and Yudu are two that come to mind. Once you've uploaded a document, you'll be able to share it via a weblink, or by embedding it in a website.